A selection of quotes to acquaint you with our worldview

The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said “This is mine,” and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.

— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754

“Hunter-Gatherers have thousands of wild sources of food to subsist on. Agriculture changed all of that, generating an overwhelming reliance on a few dozen food sources. Agriculture allowed for the stockpiling of surplus resources and thus, inevitably, the unequal stockpiling of them, stratification of society and the invention of classes. Thus, it has allowed for the invention of poverty.”

– Robert Sapolsky

The Wisdom of the Sands (From Citadelle, posthum, 1948 - The Wisdom of the Sands)